Entries from August 2008
RESTfully Forward Users to FeedBurner in Rails
After launching my new site, I realized I had forgotten to use FeedBurner to track my RSS feed subscribers. Because FeedBurner requires that you forward users to your feed on their servers, I needed a way to forward users along, but I also wanted to make sure that if FeedBurner’s spider came to the same feed URL, they would be served the source RSS instead of being forwarded. My solution ended up like this:
class NotebooksController < ApplicationController
def show
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.rss do
unless request.env['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] =~ /feedburner/i
redirect_to 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/KyleSlattery'
end
end
end
end
end
If you take a close look at the, all I’m doing is checking the user agent of the request, and unless it’s FeedBurner, I redirect the user to the “burned” feed. If it is FeedBurner, things go ahead normally, and the RSS feed gets rendered.
This means that instead of creating separate actions, one that forwards to FeedBurner, and one that renders the RSS, I just have one action/URL that does both: http://kyleslattery.com/notebook.rss. So far, it’s worked great, and doing it this way really helped to keep my code clean and RESTful.
Posting to Brightkite using ActiveResource and REST
The other day, I came across Brightkite’s REST API. After taking a look at it, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to try out ActiveResource, the dead simple way to consume RESTful resources. In 20 lines, I was able to put together a simple script to find your most recent check-in on Brightkite and then post to that place.
A Quick Intro To Active Resource
First off, here’s an idea of just how easy it is to connect to a REST API using ActiveResource. Take, for instance, the “places” resource in Brightkite; these URLs all have the base http://brightkite.com/places. To interface with places, all it takes is this:
class Place < ActiveResource::Base
self.site = 'http://brightkite.com'
end
That’s it. To get all the places, just do Place.find(:all). To create a new place, all it takes is Place.new. Amazing, to say the least. There’s a lot more that’s possible, so I recommend you check out the ActiveResource page on the Rails wiki.
The code
Below are the 20 lines necessary to post a note to Brightkite through the API. Just change USERNAME and PASSWORD to your username and password and change the note text at the bottom, and you’re ready to go. While this is a pretty simple example, it shows just how powerful a well constructed REST API can be.
Getting Brightkite and Verizon to Play Nicely
After hearing all about Brightkite from Brandice and Colin, I decided to take the plunge and try out the service a few weeks ago. In the time since, I’ve become addicted to the service, and I’m constantly amazed at how well thought out the site is. One thing that really bugged me, though, is that Brightkite doesn’t work with Verizon text messages. After being initially disheartened, I found getting around the issue to be pretty easy: instead of text messages, I used PIX messages.
If you take a look at Brightkite’s SMS Guide when logged into the service, you’ll notice a email under “Post a photo to a place.” This is the email you’ll be sending your updates to. To use any of the mobile commands (PDF) with Verizon, just send a PIX message to the email address without a photo attached. Put your command in the “text” field, send the message, and you should be good to go.
A word of caution: if you don’t have unlimited picture messaging, this method may end up being very costly. I’m not sure if Verizon still charges their PIX rate for messages without pictures, but if they do, make sure you’re not going over your allotted number of messages.
Hopefully, Verizon will fix whatever issue is breaking the Brightkite integration soon, so we don’t have to continue to hack around the problem. In the meantime, however, this method should continue to work; I haven’t had any issues with it thus far.
A Fresh Start
I never thought I’d actually get to this point, but, today, I am releasing a complete ground-up reworking of my site. With Ruby on Rails as a starting point, I was able to develop my very own content management system, and it is now powering everything here (with the help of a few plugins). I’m also excited to have a brand new design up, and it’s one I really have grown to enjoy. Read on for more details on the specifics of the new site.
The Design
Ever since I started using Twitter, I always used a stunning picture of the Crab Nebula as my background. When I started redesigning my site, I used the photo as a placeholder, but after a while it stopped being a placeholder and started driving the rest of the design, so I decided to keep it. The colors in the layout were directly influenced by the image: nearly every color comes directly from the Crab Nebula photo.
One thing I attempted with this was to not hold myself to the notion that there has to be a sidebar on every page. If you take a look at my About and Work pages, you can see where I switched things up. Personally, I think this helps to make it feel a little less like a blog, something I was definitely aiming for.
Even though I’m launching the new design today, there’s still quite a bit of refining for me to do. For one, the notebook page is pretty cluttered, so I really need to go through and organize that a lot better. In addition, several people I’ve shown the site to have mentioned that the header is a bit awkward; having the navigation attached and the title detached throws them off. I’m definitely going to need to find a better way to have that set up.
The Development
Developing the site is something I really enjoyed, and it allowed me to try a bunch of things I’ve been thinking of for a while. The site is built using Ruby on Rails, several plugins, and a whole lot of my own code.
One thing I’m proud of on the site is that every single page is cached. This way, things stay speedy, and the load on the server is lessened. Adding caching in Rails is really easy, and if you’re looking to do it yourself, you’ll probably want to check out this Rails Envy tutorial as well some Railscasts episodes.
For the server setup, I originally was planning to use Dreamhost and Phusion Passenger, but after using it for a bit, I felt like I needed a little more freedom, so I ended up buying a VPS from Slicehost. So far, I’ve been thrilled with Slicehost’s service and performance, and I’m definitely considering moving more projects over to them. As far as the technical side of things, I’m still using Passenger to run the site, though I might test out using Mongrel to see if that’s any faster.
Next Steps
I’m really excited about the new site, but I’m not done yet. Like I mentioned before, I still have some design tweaking to do, but I also have a lot I want to implement under the hood. There are bound to be issues that come up, and I’ll be hopefully fixing them as fast as possible, but if you run into something, please let me know.
I would love to hear any feedback (negative or positive) you have about the new site, so please leave a comment below!